Golden Sontakes place a few years after Red Rising, and Darrow has matured some more. He is at the end of his training, winning his last battle and then his life starts to unravel. The matriarch of the Bellona family holds a grudge like none other and she intends to have her revenge–she literally wants his heart on a platter.

Darrow has his first major set back and he doesn’t really know how to recover from it. On top of that his sponsor, Augustus, isn’t very forgiving of those who let him down. One of Darrow’s faults is his lack of politicking skills. This is a serious shortcoming when dealing with a race brought up on extreme Machiavellian tendencies. And Darrow often registers a back stabbing threat after the knife has plunged home.

Line Waris the fifth book (sixth if you count the prequel) in the Ian Cormac series which is set in the Polity universe. I’ve read Gridlinked – the first installment – and then I tried this one as an audiobook. I have to say that the gap between the first and the fifth book was too big for me to fully grasp the story. If you’re new to the series, I would not recommend starting with Line War. However, I think the series has merit and I have the prequel sitting on my shelf waiting to be read.

The Polity is a human based government that spans a large portion of the Galaxy. The AIs have fairly bloodlessly taken over and in general do a much better job than humans ever did. They appear to be a benevolent

If you love mystery, intrigue, history and out-there theories, you will love Charles J. Schneider’s A Portrait in Time. Set in Paris, the book opens with the grotesque scene of a mangled and crushed body and a beautiful, naked, and mysterious young woman strewn about Paris’s most famous museum. Thrown through time, this beautiful young woman, Nicole, wakes up in the Musee d’Orsay naked, cold, scared and confused. Beside her is the mangled corpse of a man she does not remember. She realizes she’s neither in the same location nor in the same time she came from. Nicole suffers from amnesia; she only knows that she must hide away and figure out who she is and what events led up to her being left in a museum next to the grisly body of the strange man.

Santa Rita Storiesis a novel (not a short story collection as I had anticipated) about the stories of Santa Rita, Cuba as told to the reader by a young narrator, Carlos, who is hearing the stories told by Pedro, a character who resides in the town. Pedro is an older, seasoned man, homeless, a bit eccentric and lives in squalor near the wharf of the small fishing village. He smokes discarded cigar butts, swigs cheap rum and reads anything he can get his hands on. He seems to live in this way by choice, not by circumstance, though there are parts of his past that could explain how he ended up in his current situation.

Rodriguez’s narration fits the subject matter perfectly. He sits the reader down and spins tales. As the stories progress

How far would you go to protect someone you just met? If you sought the truth about your past – and found it – could you let it go and reinvent yourself?

Saving the Innocents by Randall Kenneth Drake seeks to answer these questions and more against the backdrop of a riveting tale of suspense. Mary Jane has spent years searching for the father that abandoned her, following tips from strangers in town after town. Her life will change, though, in the events of eight days that will force her to reevaluate her priorities and her perspective. In the process, she makes unlikely friends and discovers in herself a new purpose at the moment that her life seems to be falling apart.

While Mary Jane is running after her father, young Sera is running from

The Heistis the 14th Gabriel Allon book and I enjoyed this one even more than the last couple I’ve read. Some of the books, especially the ones with Ivan, can get a bit on the gruesome side with very detailed accounts of all the nasty things people can do to each other. This one skips over most of the gore and it’s much more an international spy thriller–James Bond meets Mission Impossible.

Gabriel has been collecting a large list of ‘friends’ whose sense of right and wrong and what laws to abide by vary greatly. This time around he gets them all to help him pull off the worlds biggest heist. He started it all because his friend Isherwood happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I found Sniper’s Honorto be a very good read. I do tend to enjoy a book that tells a story of the past and the present in tandem. Here we have Bob Lee Swagger, a rather famous contemporary sniper who learns about Milli Petrova, a WWII Russian sniper who killed Nazis and then disappeared. We get the two stories in parallel–Bob trying to find out what happened to Milli and Milli’s story.

Swagger’s friend Kathy Reilly, a reporter for the Washington Post, sent him an email asking about an old Russian sniper rifle. It peaks Bob’s interest, especially when she mentions it’s in relation to a Russian sniper who disappeared from all the records. A beautiful woman sniper.

Swagger decides to hop a plane and go help his friend do a little snooping to see if between them they can find

Ireniconis a strange book and it took me some time to get into it. I think part of my problem was the write-up/blurb about it. The question posed was, “What would have happened if Jesus Christ had died as an infant?” Which made me think the author was going try for an alternate history or a big game of “what if?” Well, this is a fantasy based on alternate history and it has plenty of ‘magic’ in it (not sorcerers and witches casting spells–it’s much more subtle but it’s there). So the mention of Christ being slaughtered in a purge as a child is not the meat of the story.

The story is centered around the town Rasenna, Italy. The year is 1347. Rome is no more and Concord is the current power in the region. The ruling class are called

Based in Tasmania, Australia, The Devil’s Cradle is a story of Nina Holt who has become a prisoner of her politically powerful husband, Michael, and his brother Greg, a sadistic detective. The only light in her life is her son, nine-year-old Sam. Nina endures her situation and torture only because she knows that she can never escape with Sam; she will endure anything to have her beloved son with her.

When Sam lashes out at Nina in a mirror image of Michael—who has been grooming their son to imitate his behavior—Nina knows that it is time to run. She inventories the money hidden from Michael in bleach bottles over the years, lies to Sam about her feelings for her husband, who considers his father to be perfect, and gets him into the car to escape – taking nothing except

When I typically think of time travel stories I think of someone sitting in some sort of machine that they manipulate to transport themselves to some other time and place. But what if all we needed was our own mind to escape to the past? What if each and every one of us, the imaginative individuals who can believe beyond belief that they are in another time, actually put ourselves into a kind of hypnotic state and then open our eyes and actually find ourselves there? And what might we do with that sort of power and the ability to change events of the past to alter the events of the future? These are the unusual and thought provoking questions answered within Jack Finney’s Time and Again, a novel written almost forty five years ago but just as